Bethesda

This guide to Bethesda in Jerusalem opens with the Gospel of John's scene of crowds of the sick waiting under five covered porticoes for the water to stir, and a man who had been lying there so long nobody counted the years, until Jesus asks him one blunt question. It traces why scholars long doubted the detail of five porticoes, suspecting the writer had reached for a tidy, symbolic number rather than a real place. Look down past the broken arches at the layered stonework beneath you, Roman, Byzantine and Crusader, one built atop the last.